The Transformation of Rural China

Jonathan Unger

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315292038
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: North American History

During the past quarter century Jonathan Unger has interviewed farmers and rural officials from various parts of China in order to track the extraordinary changes that have swept the countryside from the Maoist era through the Deng era to the present day. A leading specialist on rural China, Professor Unger presents a vivid picture of life in rural areas during the Maoist revolution, and then after the post-Mao disbandment of the collectives. This is a story of unexpected continuities amidst enormous change. Unger describes how rural administrations retain Mao-era characteristics - despite the major shifts that have occurred in the economic and social hierarchies of villages as collectivization and "class struggle" gave way to the slogan "to get rich is glorious." A chapter explores the private entrepreneurship that has blossomed in the prosperous parts of the countryside. Another focuses on the tensions and exploitation that have arisen as vast numbers of migrant laborers from poor districts have poured into richer ones. Another, based on five months of travel by jeep into impoverished villages in the interior, describes the dilemmas of under-development still faced by many tens of millions of farmers, and the ways in which government policies have inadvertently hurt their livelihoods.

II
The Post-Mao Countryside

Chapter Five
Disbanding Collective Agriculture

China's move away from collective agriculture affected the lives of three-quarters of a billion people. It constituted the single most important policy shift in China since the introduction of collectives in the mid-1950s.

In an attempt to examine decollectivization and the return to family farming while interviewees' memories were still fresh, I conducted a series of interviews in mid-1983 with twenty-eight emigrants from the Chinese countryside. They were working in Hong Kong at the time and regularly returned to their home villages to visit their parents, spouses and children. Eighteen of them were from villages in Guangdong Province, and the remaining ten came from villages spread across eight other provinces and regions.¹ All of the twenty-eight had returned home on at least one extended visit, ranging from a week to several months in duration, during the year prior to the interviews.

At the time, such an interview survey was well-nigh impossible to organize inside China. Chinese officials saw no advantage in providing foreigners with room to conduct a survey that might pose ticklish questions about politically sensitive policies. Nor, in the absence of such on-the-spot surveys, did China's news media provide any sort of reliable substitute for interviews. In fact, for reasons that will be discussed below, the Chinese press consistently distorted coverage of what was occurring in the countryside during the early 1980s. The consequence was that the picture painted in the Chinese press of how decollectivization came about and the part played in it by farmers differed markedly from the accounts of interviewees.

Who Divided the Land: the State or the Farmers?

The Chinese press at the time of decollectivization conveyed the impression that villages throughout China were permitted, at their own discretion, to determine what type of agrarian system they would adopt. The slogan blazoned by the news media was Yin di zhi yi (Implement in accordance with local conditions), and detailed descriptions of all sorts of locally determined solutions filled the Chinese media. A 1981 handbook portrayed fifteen quite different systems supposedly being tried out simultaneously in the countryside,² running the gamut from specialized large-scale work groups in villages where mechanization and irrigation networks were well developed, to near-total abandonment of collectives in China's poorest districts. There, said the news media, families were dividing up all the fields and farm equipment and each household was beginning to work its own allotment separately, almost as though the fields were private holdings. Initially, the Chinese press claimed that only the 10 percent of China's villages that were the most impoverished would ever adopt this least collectivist of all options/ But according to the Chinese mass media of 1981-83, this system of independent family production (variously called bao gan dao hu [contracting management to the household] or, more commonly, dabaogan [big management contracting])⁴ was preferred eventually by the vast majority of China's peasantry. So, claimed the Chinese press, after trying out various other methods, village after village, even in the wealthier districts, opted to break up the collective holdings. By early 1984, newspapers proclaimed that more than 90 percent of China's agricultural production teams, by popular grassroots demand, had decided to decollectivize into family-operated smallholdings.⁵

Reports from interviewees suggest a rather different scenario of decollectivization. Fully twenty-six out of the twenty-eight villages in my sample had indeed decollectivized into family smallholdings by the end of 1982. But contrary to official proclamations, twenty-four of the twenty-eight interviewees related that in their own villages the decision as to precisely what type of system would be adopted was made exclusively by officials at levels far above the village. In only two villages had the team cadres and peasants themselves taken the initiative, and in one of these cases they jumped the gun and swung over to family smallholdings in a belief that the instructions to do so would soon come down from above.⁶ All of the other twenty-six villages passively waited for upper levels to tell them what to do; and when the upper levels did move, in only two of these villages were the peasantry informed that they could choose for themselves whatever system of production they preferred. Of the remaining twenty-four, fully twenty-three were shifted, without choice, into the dabaogan system of family smallholdings. Only one village among the twenty-eight received orders not to adopt family smallholdings—and this was a village of a rather uncommon type: one that specialized in sericulture. Presumably as a means of assuring state control of silk-cocoon sales, the instructions to the village stipulated that its silkworm rearing was to remain firmly in the collective sector.

Chinese newspapers and journals in the first half of the 1980s reported that many of the suburban vegetable-producing villages similarly retained a collective structure. The articles stressed that the sophistication of the irrigation networks in such villages, the high degree of mechanization there, and complex marketing schedules all would preclude the fragmentation of land into tiny family-managed plots. In late 1982, I wandered into a suburban village of this type near Beijing that had indeed adopted a system of specialized work squads rather than moving to decollectivize. But that Beijing village may not have been representative of the vegetable-producing villages of that time. My sample of twenty-eight villages includes two that specialized in vegetable production for urban markets—one near Guangzhou and the other near Tianjin—and both villages followed instructions in the early 1980s to divide all their fields into family smallholdings.

In short, my interviews suggest that most of the Chinese countryside was channeled from above into a single type of organizational structure, irrespective of the types of crops grown or the level of local economic development. Moreover, contrary to the repeated claims of the Chinese news media and top political leaders alike, very few villages were offered any choice in the matter. In the years since my 1983 interviews, I inquired in eight other villages in different parts of China as to how decollectivization had occurred, and all eight villages had similarly been shifted into family smallholdings (dabaogan) without any local choice in the matter.

Why do the interview findings differ so dramatically from the official press coverage of government newspapers at that time? Had China's top leadership directed the news media to engage in deliberate and sustained distortions as to the real nature of the decollectivization process? Or were the leaders in Beijing themselves not entirely cognizant of the manner in which their programs for change in the countryside were being carried out at the grassroots? The evidence from the interviews and from Chinese publications, coupled with what we know of past campaigns in the People's Republic, strongly suggest that both factors were at work simultaneously.

To understand why this confusing scenario of half-conscious distortion occurred, it is necessary to look back to 1977, after Mao's death, when China's new leadership, in an attempt to revitalize the agricultural economy, began gingerly to dismantle the various "ultra-leftist" rural policies of the previous decade. To restore incentives, in 1977 some of the leadership in Beijing had begun pressing for China's production teams to decentralize into the hands of smaller labor groupings (bao chart dao zu). Under the new dispensation, as was observed for Chen Village in the previous chapter, a team's lands were to be distributed among smaller labor squads, which were to hand in the yields at harvest's end in exchange for payments from the production team. In turn, the squad was supposed to apportion these payments among its members on the basis of how much work each peasant individually had accomplished.

In my sample, eleven of the twenty-eight villages had experienced this program of decentralization between 1977 and 1980; and every one of these eleven villages simply had obeyed directives coming down to them, rather than being given leeway to take any initiative themselves.⁷ Just as significantly, the decision as to whether a given village should participate or not did not follow any discernible standards of economic logic.⁸ Villages had been selected in a seemingly arbitrary fashion by county and commune-level officials who had concluded that it was politically expedient to demonstrate that villages under their own jurisdiction were shifting into the new program.

This decentralization into labor squads brought mixed results. In some of the villages surveyed, productivity improved; in others, peasants continued to exhibit a disinclination to labor. Some of the new leaders who were politically associated with Deng Xiaoping were convinced that these lingering problems could not entirely be blamed upon any residual peasant disaffection with the radicalism and bureaucratic interference of Mao's final years. The persisting difficulties, they apparently believed, stemmed from a more far-reaching problem of two-and-a-half decades' duration: too great a degree of socialism had originally been imposed.

Two and a half decades earlier, during the mid-1950s, a debate had occurred within the Party's top echelons. Leaders like Liu Shaoqi had felt that China was not yet ready for collectivization. As long as modern agricultural machinery was not widely available and farming remained labor-intensive, farmers should work their own plots of land. Mao, championing the other side in this debate, had argued that China should not delay until agricultural mechanization was feasible. He was convinced that production in a system of collective agriculture would climb by means of a more efficient large-scale organization of land and labor. Mao pushed his beliefs through in 1955-56 in a "high tide" of collectivization. Now, in the late 1970s, part of the leadership was indicating that the Party's agrarian policies since the mid-1950s may have been misguided.

A small percentage of the peasantry in some of the poorest parts of China were simultaneously beginning to test, in the late 1970s, whether they could return to family farming. As was observed in Chapter One, in such impoverished marginal agricultural districts, but not elsewhere, officials under Mao had customarily looked the other way. when peasants violated state policy. The evidence strongly suggests that it was only in these desperately poor districts that villages dared in the late 1970s to take the initiative in moving beyond labor squads. One of the villages in my sample was located in precisely such a marginal district—Fengyang County in Anhui Province, which coincidentally would subsequently become famous in China as the first county to move in this direction. This was one of the only two villages in my interview survey that did not simply respond to orders from above. My informant from this village has confided:

I was the team accountant at the time, and I said to the team head that since the labor squads weren't working out well, let's just hand out the fields to the families. On our own initiative, we secretly did so in early 1979. I kept two account books, one for the authorities above us and one for real. I was prepared to be punished, but I felt that with villagers going hungry, dividing up the land made the most sense.

This interviewee was lucky. In January 1979, in the wake of a drought, the provincial Party secretary, Wan Li, visited Fengyang County and declared, "family sideline production shouldn't be restricted, let them do it. . . . In fact, individual farming is nothing to get excited about. ... I only fear that production will not be raised. As long as production is increased, any method is fine."⁹ That same year, the illicit effort of one particular backwater hamlet in Fengyang to divide up the fields among households was endorsed by the Party committee of the prefecture that contains Fengyang County, and two forms of household farming in this prefecture's poor counties received the prefectural leadership's blessing.¹⁰

Under bao chan dao hu (contracting production to the household), the first of the experiments that were sanctioned under Wan Li's aegis in 1979 (he personally endorsed it in February of that year),¹¹ each family, under the supervision of its team, was allocated responsibility for cultivating given plots of land. As was observed in the previous chapter, this was the same system, using the very same title, that Chen Village and many other villages had temporarily adopted nearly two decades earlier in the devastating wake of the Great Leap Forward's collapse. Once again in the late 1970s in Fengyang County, the production team provided each family with implements, seed, and fertilizer, and at harvest time the family delivered all the crops to the team, which paid the family in workpoints based on the size of the yields. The family, in short, was given the freedom to organize its own daily labor, but it could not decide for itself what to grow and it could not sell any of the crops on its own.

Under the second experiment, dabaogan (the so-called big management contracting), land ownership also remained with the team, but the individual households could use the land that was allotted to them to diversify into any crops they liked just so long as they used a portion of the land to help meet the team's crop-quota deliveries to the state. They could sell their remaining crops on their own, either to the state purchasing stations or on the free market. This dabaogan system would leave little role for the collective teams. For all intents and purposes, team members would be transformed into independent peasant smallholders (albeit without the right to sell the land or to put it to nonagricultural uses). Fengyang County, the home of my interviewee, became the officially sanctioned pioneer of this system: in early 1980 Wan Li visited the production team in Fengyang that had first received permission to practice dabaogan, and personally endorsed the system for this type of terribly impoverished district.

Wan Li was among the more prominent of Deng Xiaoping's backers, and his endorsement of household cultivation in impoverished districts gained political visibility when, in early 1980, he was elevated to the Party Politburo in Beijing and appointed deputy premier in charge of agriculture. Very soon after arriving in Beijing, during the Spring Festival, he received support for his Anhui policies from top leaders such as Chen Yun and Hu Yaobang,¹² and within a few more weeks, in May 1980, Deng Xiaopi...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I—The Countryside Under Mao
• II—The Post-Mao Countryside
• A Selected Bibliography
• Index